Saturday, 27 August 2011

While his fate is unknown at this point (public or hidden retirement, being taken on trial, being behaded by the "rebels" with the smiling approval of the "civilized" world...), what is clear now is that Gaddafi is over.

What a beautiful world, thousands of peoples have been murdered by NATO bombs and the NATO sponsored "rebels", the infrastructures of a modern country completly destroyed (and waiting for reconstruction, what a yummi cake!), a harsh division of the country between pro and anti-"rebels" that sure will burden the country for many years... but hey, they've got ridden of the dictator and democracy is waiting. Once again the Global powers have done their duty, spreading democracy and freedom to one more "dark corner" of the world. "Freedom", a pretty depreciated concept.

For Global powers Freedom means Democracy, and that's pretty easy to understand, Democracy nowadays is such a convenient form of government... it's the easiest way to keep masses "happpy", silent, calm and conform. There's not better way to prevent someone from seeking something than making him believe that he already has it. "You're free", you're allowed to choose your government, you're allowed to represent you community by entering the political system, and bla, bla, bla...
Yes, you're allowed to choose between the political parties, but only those that the Global powers fund, you're free to choose between the different lies spread by the Mass Media owned by the Global powers, you're free to receive decent education and decent medical care if you can afford it...

It wouldn't have to be that way, sure democracy could be a good system of government, but the problem is that in the last decades, every new place that has been "awarded" with democracy has received it with one more extra gift, "Brutal Capitalism". Yes, since a long while Democracy comes hand in hand with Neoliberlism and capitalism, so Democracy has turned out being a poisoned gift for so many countries.
Take a look at Soviet Union, is the average Russian better now (not being able to send his kids to the University, spending half of his income in the rent of a dilapidated flat...) than in the Soviet times?, take a look at Serbia, take a look at Ukraine or Romania, think about those young Eastern women forced to leave their country (so democratic now) to sell their bodies in some mafia owned brothel in one of our so democratic countries...

If democracy is so important for "our leaders" it's odd that it has taken them 40 years to come to the realization that Libya should be democratized by any means (like Irak...), and it's even more strange that Syrians do not deserve that brilliant fate (or what to say about Somalia, where if Islamists had been wiped out and a functional government established it would be a bit easier now to deal with the current famine)...
Of course, there's a clear difference, profit, or let's put it clear booty. Same as Iraq was, Lybia is a wealthy country, and as such, a highly desirable prey for global capitalism. It's not just taking over the oil deposits, it's the reconstruction process. How many millions will be spent in rebuilding all the infrastrutures destroyed by the NATO forces? Libya has a huge flow of petrodollars, so let's suck it dry!

There's an important point to notice about the NATO war on Libya:
Contrary to what happened with Iraq, there's been hardly any visible opposition to this war among the different "progressist" groups in the Western world. Sounds odd, cause I still have fresh in my mind the images of the huge demonstrations against the invasion of Iraq... So what?, well, Global Powers learned a lesson from the "Weapons of Mass Deception" thing. For many people solidarity is above fear, so trying to terrorize people with an imminent threat (biological weapons, nuclear weapons, terrorism...) does not work when they know that the "remedy" to that unlikely threat means dragging millions of people into the very certain horrors of war. But there's an easy workaround, let's put the victims on our side. Let's create a group of "freedom fighters" (the so called "rebels") and let's say that these honorable freedom advocates are being slaughtered by the dictator (yes, that's true, Gaddafi was getting rid of the "rebels" with violence, as he had always done, but the same violence that they had started off with). The trap is ready, and most "progressist" Westerns will take the bait, who could oppose the helpful actions of the "Keepers of peace" trying to help "freedom fighters" and civilians against the awful dictator...?
There's been no questioning among the mass, few people seemed to care about who the "rebels" are, about what would come next if they seized power... Well, the "rebels" are a mix of Radical Islamist (wahhabists, salafists... all that scum that hates us, Westerns, so much), monarchists, some progressist pro-Western Lybians (but don't worry, they'll have little to say in the future government, probably as the Iranian Ayatolah did with the Communists after the "Islamic Revolution", they'll get smashed by the "beardies") and finally, a wide group of opportunists initially on Gaddafi's side that switched sides as they realized that the Regime had little to do against all the NATO machinery...

Well, at least we can think of the positive things of this senseless destruction:
the economies of those more involved in this shameless war: France, USA, UK, Spain... will get a boost with all the contracts to sign to rebuild Lybia. Anyway, sure they'll tell us that boost is not enough to stop the cutbacks to the Education System, Health System... well underway in most of Europe...
I bet it'll take just a few months to have the first Hollywood Blockbuster telling the story of the "heroes of Tripoli"...

Friday, 19 August 2011

I truly admire this man since the first time someone (thanks Gus!) sent me a link to one of his videos: Free Speech in Eurabia. Ever since I regularly check his web to catch up with his new videos, and I've never been disappointed, just the contrary, such is my admiration that I've even "paid him a beer" via Paypal.

Even living in the country that is undergoing probably the sharpest process of Islamization in Europe, he's not afraid to fiercely criticize Radical Islam, unveiling the facts of this demonic threat with an astonishing sense of humor. Hopefully, he does not stop there, and also attacks Radical Christians, brainless "suicidal leftists" and NeoNazis alike (by the way, it's fun to notice, reafirming how trendy and brainless these shitheads are, that while now most NeoNazis tend to be antiIslam, just a few years ago they used to be rather proIslam)
We could consider Pat a Heroe of Western liberties, someone that with each of his speeches reminds us that we have a responsability to keep and improve this our civilization, one that our ancestors built by rebelling against feudal lords, kings, bishops and dictators, and that we can't remain with our arms folded, prisoners of "Political Correctness" while a bunch of illiterate zealots attempt to destroy it.

This time Pat is particularly angry (and it's not surprising, my feelings, being someone that has only been to Britain as a visitor, were also really strong in view of the shameful events happening last week), and he does a glorious speech against all those lame, ungrateful bastards that tried to terrify and bring to its kneels a whole society.
I absolutely share his views and I think to know enough about England to be pretty certain that most of those vandals were not "victims of society" like some "PC media" try to portray them, but just the contrary, lazy bastards living off this society, taking advantage of all sort of social aid: housing, wages...
the others are just hooligans or normal idiots wanting to feel bad an rebellious.

Something interesting in this episode of violence and that I think is rather specific to UK is the lack of power on the Police side. I'm not talking about the lack of materials (thought I have to admit that not being allowed to carry guns really shocked me), but about the inability to properly confront criminals cause any sort of physical "contact" with them would almost certainly end up with the policemen in court.
That's not the same here, just the contrary (and that's not for good either, cause in Asturies-Spain policemen are known for their violence and impunity, mainly when they act against workers or left wing people).
What I think is common to all of Europe (at least to all those countries living under the Political Correctness Dictatorship) is that common citizens are not allowed to defend themselves. Confronting a criminal, either a common street robber, a NeoNazi or a Latin Gang (both equally stupid and xenophobic) or someone entering your home and attacking you and your family, is not allowed in any way in our weak societies where any sort of self defense causing any harm to your aggressor would end up in serious problems for you. If you're lucky, that will just mean paying a huge compensation to the criminal (and a bitter feeling of helplessness on your side), but that well could end up for you in a prison sentence much more severe than anyone ever served by your attacker.

Shit, all this absurdity is sickening, so no better way to sort it that finishing this write up with some sentences by Pat Condell that ever manage to make me smile:
Multicultural fascism
PC totalitarianism
Post Imperialist Guilt
Islam dominates, not integrates
pathetic, pompous human vermin

Friday, 12 August 2011

GWT is a reasonable implementation of a poor
architectural choice. GWT attempts to hide many of
the details of the web as a platform by creating desktop
metaphors in Java and generating JavaScript code to
implement them. First, in many ways, JavaScript is
more powerful and expressive than Java, so we
suspect that the generation is going in the wrong
direction. Secondly, it is impossible to hide a complex
abstraction difference like that from event-driven
desktop to stateless-web without leaky abstraction
headaches eventually popping up. Third, it suffers from
the same shortcomings of many elaborate frameworks,
where building simple, aligned applications is quick and
easy, building more sophisticated but not supported
functionality is possible but difficult, and building
the level of sophistication required by any non-trivial
application becomes either impossible or so difficult
it isn’t reasonable.

Wow, even never having done any development with GWT I think I can fully endorse those claims without fear of being wrong. When I first heard of GWT some years ago I thought it was a huge step back.
My boss in one of my first development projects was a real "guru", a visionary that had developed an impressive RIA framework in the early 2000's, using tons of beautiful Object Oriented JavaScript (both on the client and on the classic ASP server), CSS, Active X (it was for intranet applications that only needed to run on IE), an excellent debug console and tons of XHR (at that time JSON was almost unknown, so it was sending/receiving needlessly verbose XML). The first versions even used iFrames instead of XHR.
Well, I'm telling all this because thanks to that (and to an old o'reilly JavaScript book where I first read about prototypes) I've been pretty aware of the power of JavaScript and client side coding from rather early, and that's why GWT smelled like crap to me since the first moment.
Translating Java to JavaScript seemed absolutely ridiculous to me (I could even say insulting), and it can only be justified by wanting to do life easy to sloppy programmers that are not willing to learn a new language and paradigm. It appears to me a terrible mistake, similar to the error of keeping VB around by morphing it into VB.Net, instead of forcing developers to learn the beauty of C#...

The idea of hiding the Web particularities under a "desktop metaphor" was first implemented in Asp.Net WebForms, and I would say that with terrible results (don't get me wrong, it can be OK for some kind of applications, but not for the kind of applications that we need today, well, hopefully now we have the almighty Asp.Net MVC) that were hardly improved with the addition of "Update panels". Shit, I remember the pain of trying to make some basic JavaScript DOM manipulation in an Asp.Net 2.0 Web application (with tons of update panels, puff...) that we developed 4 years ago... the hacks that we had to devise to work around all the limitations imposed by "the Web as the Desktop" nightmare...

Web Developers have had excellent DOM, Ajax, effects, "language enrichment" libraries since a long while (jQuery, mootools, dojo...), so what we now need are JavaScript frameworks pushing and helping us to write more maintainable JavaScript intensive applications. It seems like backbone.js and JavaScriptMVC could be good steps in that direction. Unfortunately I haven't had a chance to play a bit with them, but I'm longing to get my hands dirty with them :-)

Saturday, 6 August 2011

The last work by the almighty Neil Marshall is, as one could expect, another masterpiece.From my review of The Descent 2, it's clear that I love both installments of The Descent. As for Doomsday, I've been about to write a review several times, but in the end I've never got to it, the thing is that is an amazing film drawing from different excellent influences, though maybe it's a too crazy mix at times and probably I would have dismissed a few parts.

Centurion will keep you stuck to your screen for 90 minutes. The story is pretty interesting, more if like me you're pretty interested in history, early inhabitants of Europe, the Atlantic Arc... It wisely uses one of the possible explanations to the disappearance of the Roman Ninth Legion as background for a story of escape, revenge and survival. If you add to it the stunning Scottish landscapes, the Picts (the misterious ancestors of the Scottish people that were able to put to halt the (until then) unstoppable advance of the Roman empire (not even my ancestors had managed to stop them), and the captivating beauty of Olga Kurylenko you have a sure winner.